Jet Black
by JustSteph
Summary: Angst-ness that I wrote a long time ago, and in a very different incarnation...


"**Jet black… the blood that's in your veins"**

I used to be so fucking disillusioned. I used to dream, used to pretend that I was a princess. Stupid games, but then I was a stupid kid. I never could keep my mouth shut, never could stay out of trouble… never could stay out of the house long enough. I sometimes wonder what it was that ruined me; that ruined those precious illusions. Was it the things I saw, the things I did, the things I had done to me? Was it you? Were you the one who shattered that final piece of hope I had that some day everything would pull together, because it had to, because the world couldn't just let a person exist without really living?

We never stood a chance, and sitting in this club the wrong side of sober, I can see that now. Funny how clarity can only come when my mind is foggy with alcohol and smoke, or maybe it's just the only time I can bear to be alone in my own skin. The only time I can stand having so many thoughts, feeling so many things that if I were to explain them, I know I could make you understand. But as much as I know that, I know that it will never, ever happen. Because I'll never find the words, if they even exist.

Watching you watching everything but me, it's like this exquisite torture that hits me right in the gut, hits every part of my body and just makes me want to claw my way out of myself. Overcome with destructive urges I can hardly control, I muse on how easy it would be to just stab this cigarette into my arm, how little it would affect anyone in this room; how welcome the distraction of superficial pain would be. Princess used to dream, but now her blood's black and it runs rivers down her wrists.

You make me so mad. You tear me up, and leave me with nothing; no means to fix myself, to rebuild or try and live; try to carry on breathing. Sometimes I'll sit in my room all day, I'll sit and I'll wait for you, because I'm that pathetic. Because maybe there is still some part of me that believes in fairy tales, since you've made me so very well aware that a fairy tale would be the only way you'd come and save me. The times when I'm feeling strong, well maybe then I have the chance of making my way out of the glorious depravity in which I live; or I have a chance at trying, anyway. But there are sixty seconds in a minute, and it's hard to be strong through all of them, knowing that with the passage of time I'm getting further away from you and me, from all of what used to be.

You burnt me up, reduced me to this ever crumbling pile of ashes that has to try and pretend to be real, to be actually alive. Maybe if you'd just taken me… if we'd just had each other in a drunken haze of lust, this would be easier to write off as another cheap fuck and another bruise on my soul. Maybe I should stop fucking kidding myself and admit that however it had happened, it would always have meant more to me than that, would always have warped itself and become so utterly bittersweet and tragic in my mind. No matter what, I would always have ended up hating us both this much, and never knowing which one of us I wanted to harm more.

I sometimes think the most disgusting things. I think of coming up behind you and snapping your head back with such force that I pulled out hair. I can't help it; I can't help thinking the way I do. I'm the bad one, right? Isn't this the stuff I'm supposed to think about?

Sometimes the opposite is true, and all I can think about is holding you tight, and worshipping you like you're my real-life princess. Caressing you slowly, making you cry with the ecstasy of it all, making you bite your lip until you draw blood. That's what it always has to come back to with me: blood. Love **is** blood. Blood is the magical substance running through our bodies that has me so fascinated; lose just a millilitre too much and you're gone forever, but a little can't do any harm, right?

I'm so fucked up; maybe that's why you ended things. Maybe it all got too much for you, the realisation that I'd never be the kind of girl you could take to a wedding with you, the kind of girl you'd ever consider marrying. Maybe you realised that there wouldn't be flowers, candy and little heart shaped boxes with me; that all you'd get would be the opportunity to see into my jet black heart for split seconds, shards in time, where I'd allow you to see me in the darkness. That was the only thing I could have possibly offered you, my only gift, and yet it wasn't good enough.

You're dancing now, keeping in time with the solitary rhythm which I'd love to try to join you in. Wearing red, looking like blood, like sex and death and the most decadent dance of deception I could ever hope to imagine. My hands, they should be red, they're plenty stained, but in this sultry lighting the blood just looks black, shimmering marks of demonic pain. I'd like to touch you, like to stain you, but I know I'd just wash away.

I smashed it all up, smashed away the glass of the mirror you used to do your hair in when you stayed over. I smashed away the chipped porcelain of the plates we used to eat cheap Chinese take away off of in bed, wishing I could smash away the porcelain of your princess complexion. It didn't help though; it didn't make it come true. What do I have to do to erase the image of you lying naked in my sheets? Always my sheets, which just goes to show how inadequate I really was: you'd never have allowed me your bed.

It would be so easy to just stab this cigarette into my arm, but I really haven't the energy. So much of my time is spent consumed by you; consumed by hate, fear, pain, passion, obsession, lust… love. Hate again. I hate you because I'm not allowed to love you; can't you see that? I could hurt myself so much; I could hurt **you** so much. But I don't. Don't you see, Catherine? I could burn myself, but why bother when you do it so much better?


End file.
